Colour tattoo of a turquoise owl perched on a bare branch before a grey moon, with purple swirls, covering the upper arm and shoulder.

Turquoise owl and moon on a shoulder

Neo-trad · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A turquoise owl with amber eyes sits on a branching twig in front of a pale grey moon. Purple and lilac swirls fill the background and wrap around the upper arm, with soft shading on the feathers and a bold dark outline. The composition follows the curve of the shoulder, with the owl placed centrally and the branch reaching out towards the edge of the arm.

Neo-trad Shoulder Upper arm Owl Moon Branch Swirl Tree

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marguerite Vance had driven the Nine Mile stretch for eleven years and never once stopped for owls. Tonight the headlights caught a pale blue shape on a dead branch of paloverde, and she braked before she could think about the tyre warning blinking on the dash.

Keep reading

She got out. The air smelt of cooling tarmac and creosote. The owl turned its head with the slow certainty of something that had been waiting, its amber eyes catching the light. Behind it the moon hung grey and oddly large, a pale coin pinned to the sky, and the bare branches spread out like cracked glass. Her father used to say owls were the road's bookkeepers: they counted who passed and never told anyone the total.

A lorry came over the rise with its horn long and tired. The owl lifted, not in fright but as if it had finished a sum. It flew low across the verge, wings the colour of a swimming pool under sodium lamps, and settled on the next post down the road. Marguerite felt something in her chest shift by one line.

She climbed back into the cab, found the spare in the boot, and changed the wheel by torchlight. When she finished, a feather lay on the driver's seat, turquoise and tipped with grey. She tucked it into the sun visor and drove on towards the lights of Harlow Wells, counting the posts as she went.